


Not a Tame Lion

by sovay



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Ancient History, Archaeology, Asexual Character, Bisexual Character, Calormen, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 15:06:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15342471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovay/pseuds/sovay
Summary: Each time he returned from the roaring northern deserts or the brackish marshes to the south of the civilized world, Šamirat's brother brought her another portion of the past, as treasured and incomplete as a family story—stamp-seals, eye-stones, shards of fired clay.





	Not a Tame Lion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cyphomandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/gifts).



Each time he returned from the roaring northern deserts or the brackish marshes to the south of the civilized world, Šamirat's brother brought her another portion of the past, as treasured and incomplete as a family story—stamp-seals, eye-stones, shards of fired clay. Alone in her room where the shadows lay cool behind the lattice and the sun did not dazzle a close-bent eye, she pieced together the dry bright tiles of crumbled mosaics, carefully rewired pieces of cracked agate and flattened gold; the floor around her bed was fanned with different sizes and colors of broken pottery. Some her brother sold as antiques, others she kept to decorate the house that had been their mother's, with its blue-tiled pool in a hedge of myrtle and the sour cherry tree that bloomed in summer like a wind of white lace. Sometimes he brought her new things—a jade plaque, a bronze bell—but they gave her nothing to restore or puzzle over, only admire. Her own jewelry was starting to be outnumbered by fragments of belts or pins or anklets from a hundred or a thousand years ago. Šulman had taken to joking that she would have to leave her bedroom to the schools at Tašbaan when she died.

At home he looked very much like what he was, a young merchant of the city of Tehišbaan, his neat blue-black beard bluer still with new indigo, his sleeves smelling as always—between ventures, at least; Šamirat had accompanied him once as far south as the contested border and the way the smell of camel had worked its way into even the waterskins was a thing she expected never to forget—of cedar oil and roses. Three times a year he took a caravan south or north or west, even into the mountain passes where ice clung like spilled glass to the trail. He had returned safe for ten years. Some year he might not. Someday he would marry, perhaps one of the practically minded daughters of his trading partners, who along with their courtesies and poets knew the worth of wool and silk and saffron and the origins and markets of each; perhaps the woman he spoke of sometimes in the city above the marshes, the king's guard with scarred arms and cheeks the color of ironwood, to whom he sent letters year-round by the couriers of Azim Balda and who might never leave her king to live in a northern and warlike country where women were praised as flowers and jewels, not blades. In no case, Šamirat thought, would a marriage alter the frequency and affection with which he saw his friend of the baths and the gardens, Artašes who was neither supple as a panther nor stalwart as a bull nor any of the canons of male beauty and in his shy, steadfast, slightly ridiculous propriety had been part of her brother's life since before Šamirat was old enough to paint her hands. She found him unannounced in the garden sometimes, eating barberries and reading history. She herself had no particular friend, no suitors; had never wanted either, though she talked happily enough with women in baths and gardens both. _I am content as I am,_ she had told her brother the last time they spoke of it, and after that he seemed content to live with his short-sighted sister who squinted to make out a visitor's face across a room but discerned the most minute details of carven ivory or broken clay as if she looked bare-eyed through lenses of ground glass. From his last venture in the spring, he had brought her half a cylinder seal showing a priestess offering to some winged gods, the delicate rubble of a tin-glazed vase with a pattern of ducks and rushes, the flaking verdigris of a shield-boss with a lion clawed onto the back of a bellowing bull. She thought carefully about keeping the last item in her room, even knowing that her brother who passed no shrine without an offering had thought it safe to bring home. Šamirat did not think of herself as superstitious, but she took a rose from the garden trellis that night and left it in front of the ancient bronze: a token of Zardeenah in whose hand lay the safety of maidens, marriage-destined or not.

In the days before Calormen, the old kings of the sand-ruined palaces and the boundary stones still seen asserting their vain dominion over cities of waste and owl-cries had hunted lions in echo of inexorable Taš, whose ceaseless combat by day and night kept chaos from devouring the four-quartered world. Šulman himself had never excavated one, but Šamirat had seen their reliefs in alabaster and limestone, huge slabs of intricate design levered up from wind-toppled walls to decorate some younger Tarkhaan's gardens: the great beasts snarling, pierced with arrows, the king with lance or bow leaning from his horse or his chariot without passion or exertion, subduing the forces of disorder as the shepherd of his people must. If there was no one living who could read their arrow-barbed writing, their names and conquests lost to the drift of time, the carved proof of their ritual still testified across the centuries to an unbroken continuity between those nameless kings and the Tisroc at Tašbaan, forever-living as the sun. The stewards of Taš always beat back chaos, violence, night. Their armies moved forward across the land, binding all unruly elements within the dominion of the god who could be neither evaded nor denied. The sole child of their father's first wife had died in this work, in a skirmish by the Winding Arrow when Šulman was a child and Šamirat barely born: _lost to the Lion,_ she had heard in hushed whispers as she grew, and suffered nightmares of claws and fangs and a furnace of golden mane like the hammer of the sun on the desert's salt pan until Šulman—beardless, with black-cherry eyes, just beginning to follow their father in his trade—brought her into the outer courts of the great temple of Taš and showed her the god himself in contest with the beasts of chaos, victorious every time. Hand in hand before the immense walls tiled in blue and gold and cinnabar and mint-green, they had stood solemnly with the sun warming their covered heads until a polite but perplexed priest came to ask after their parents. They had joked to each other for years that they should have called themselves foundlings and run away into the service of Taš who would never ask them to memorize the names and seasons of trade winds and Šamirat had dreamed no more of lions.

Her brother traded with them now and then in season, the barbarians in the north who worshipped the Lion and reviled the irresistible Taš as if he were a demon or a ghoul, a whining miasma of sickness to be cast out by a priest of Azaroth. _They feel as sorry for us with our temples full of gods,_ Šulman had said once, thoughtfully, _as a child who owned a dog might feel for another child who owned nothing but dozens and dozens of little pottery dogs, all treasured, all carefully preserved, all toys._ Šamirat had laughed, thinking of their father's high-strung sight-hounds which worried expensive upholstery and embroidered hangings to shreds if given too little to do: _Then I think they overestimate the honor of owning a dog!_ But the image had stayed with her, especially when she saw fair-skinned traders or adventurers in the markets of Tehišbaan, sometimes wearing her country's clothing, always looking around them as though the stalls of dyed cotton and vegetables and copper vessels were some fabulous panoply unrolled for their pleasure, like a play. She should feel sorry for them, she thought, born to a land of unnatural winters and unknown to Taš. Without his four arms to shield from danger in all directions, without his far-sighted eyes that knew each citizen of his lands as the sun knew each seedling, she could imagine a people turning instead to the very powers of chaos that beset them, making a cult of their wildness and unpredictability as she had known beaten women to persuade themselves that the hardness of their husband's fists was evidence of their rightness in the argument. Once, buying radishes and apricots by one of the lesser temples, she had watched a brown-haired man in barbarian tunic and hose fold a beggar child's hand over the glint of a silver crescent with a grave wink, like a street magician pulling a flower from behind her ear, and felt oddly reassured, as if a ghoul had smiled and shown ordinary human teeth. Then she had watched him rise to his feet and, hearing the prayer-call from the temple at the gong of noon, pull as wry a face as if he had drunk vinegar, sling an arm around the shoulders of his sunburnt countryman, and hurry them both away laughing through a swirl of children as small and stick-chested and bewildered as the girl with the heavy coin clutched to her mouth in both thin hands: so the demon chewed on bones after all. Disorder was not only primordial darkness, the tumultuous unformed waters from which the universe was split and raised and fortified, its tiered and walled shape the blueprint of a city with a just ruler at its heart. A man's behavior could be a thing out of place, unseemly. Not being a king of the ancient desert or the Tisroc at Tašbaan, she had not known what else to do but give her apricots to the street children and run home, to reconstruct with shaking fingers some splinters of ivory with a tulip motif and furiously weep.

In the morning she worked on the shield-boss, brushing away the reddish clinging dirt without peeling any more of the fragile patina from the wrinkled mouth, the powerful shoulders, the diamond-tufted mane. Zardeenah's rose lay on the tabletop beside her hand, a less somber red by daylight, rich as pomegranate seeds. Downstairs she could hear Šulman with his coffee and one of his business associates, talking about the sea-trade south and east; the legends of bold explorers who sailed so far into the dawn that they crossed the tideless waters of death and came into the sun's own country had never deterred more grounded travelers from daring the weather and wrecking currents of the Eastern Sea. She wondered if the smell of corroding salt and wet rigging would be better than the taste of camels always in one's mouth. The bronze lion snarled under her fingertips, as savage in victory as she had imagined from its depictions in defeat. For a moment the body beneath its rending weight was a man's, faceless as her never-known brother's or a child's blurred through her close-work vision and tears; then it was only tile-green time-eaten metal, still cooler than her touch in the dove-hours of the day. A craftsman of the deserts had hammered it out to defend a soldier against the swords and arrows of his enemies, a wild bull still fighting despite the weight of fear and confusion on his back. Nothing else of them had survived the eroding centuries, not even as much as the king in whose service they had held back the sharp and shapeless wrongness of things. Šulman as he traveled had seen lions in the wild and lived. If he went to sea instead of the silk-routes this year, Šamirat thought she might go with him; until then she put the goddess' rose in her poppy-black hair and took up her brush again, to do her best to diminish the chaos in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> In general I feel quite positively toward lions, but [Cyphomandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/) mentioned Assyrian lion hunts and it shook something about Calormene religion loose in my head. Because I did not have ready access to copies of either _The Horse and His Boy_ (1954) or _The Last Battle_ (1956) at the time of writing, I took the chance that knowing almost nothing about the Ottoman or Mughal Empires or wherever Lewis got his Orientalist motifs would not wreck me; I worked with a heavy fictionalization of Persian history and Neo-Assyrian art instead. There are diacritics in all the names because I like them. Written September 2016.


End file.
